Section B

36-35 D D B C A A B D D C

Passage One

An elderly woman yesterday made a legal claim against a department store because it had wrongly accused her of stealing a Christmas card. Ms. Doss white, 72 years old, is claiming $3,000 damages from the store for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment. Ms. White visited the store while doing Christmas shopping, but did not buy anything. She was followed though the town by a store manager. He had been told that a customer saw her take a card and put it in her shopping bag. He stopped her at a bookstore as she was reading a book. Ms. White said, “This man, a total stranger, suddenly grasped my bag and asked if he could look in it.” She was taken back to the store and shut in a small room in full view of shopper for 20 minutes until the police arrived. At the police station she was body-searched and nothing was found. Her lawyer said the department store sent an insincere apology and they insisted that she may have been stealing. The hearing continues today.

Q1. What does the story tell us about the old woman?

Q2. What was said to have been stolen?

Q3. What happened to Ms. White after she was taken back to the store?

Q4. What was now the attitude of the department store in this legal case?

Passage Two

My friend, Vemon Davies kept birds. One day he phoned and told me he was going away for a week. He asked me to feed the birds for him and said that he would leave the key to his front door in my mailbox.

Unfortunately, I forgot all about the birds until the night before Vemon was going to return. What was worse, it was already dark when I arrived at his house. I soon found the key Vernon gave me could not unlock either the front door or the back door. I was getting desperate. I kept thinking of what Vemon would say when he came back.

I was just going to give up when I noticed that one bedroom window was slightly open. I found a barrel and pushed it under the window. As the barrel was very heavy, I made a lot of noise. But in the end, I managed to climb up and open the window.

I actually had one leg inside the bedroom when I suddenly realized that someone was shining a torch up at me. I looked down and saw a policeman and an old lady, one of Vemon’s neighbours. “What are you doing up there?” said the policeman. Feeling like a complete fool, I replied, “I was just going to feed Mr. Davies’s birds.”

Q1. Why couldn’t the man open the door?

Q2. Why did the man feel desperate?

Q3. Why did the man feel like a fool?

Passage Three

When Iraq troops blew up hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells at the end of the Gulf War, Scientists feared environmental disaster. Would black powder in the smoke from the fires circle the globe and block out the sun?

Many said, “No way; rain would wash the black power from the atmosphere. But in America, air sampling balloons have detected high concentrations of particles similar to those collected in Kuwait that didn’t catch fire. It has formed huge lakes in the Kuwaiti desert. They trap insects and birds, and poison a variety of other desert animals and plants.

The only good news is that the oil lakes have not affected the underground water resources. So far, the oil has not been absorbed because of the hard sand just below the surface.

Nothing, however, stops the oil from evaporating. The resulting poisonous gases are choking nearby residents.

Officials are trying to organize a quick cleanup, but they are not sure how to do it. One possibility is to burn the oil. Get those black-powder detectors ready.

Q1. What were the scientists worried about soon after the Gulf War?

Q2. What was the good news for scientists?

Q3. What are the officials trying to do at the moment?